Multple websites in IIS and Only one Default.htm is working

In a really ideal situation you'd have a static IP for each site and not rely on name-based hosting for them - there is actually some argument that it will improve SEO (Search Engine Optimization) in doing so. Other than that, I agree with the above points regarding funnelling all .htm calls through CF. That's terribly inefficient no matter how good CF8 is since running them as straight HTML will let the visitor's browser interpret it directly rather than have CF process the HTML as CF code then pass it on to the browser.

You setup certainly sounds like what I would expect out of IIS Admin but I've never pushed all my HTML files through CFML and don't know what sort of issues one might run into with such an approach (back when I started with CF, I was "told" not to run HTML files through CF because of performance issues but that was back in the CF5 days and don't know if this would still be an issue).

If you altered the default files for the sites to be a CFML page, do you run into the same problem (i.e, homepages for each site is named default.cfm)? Since you're running HTML and CFM files through the CF engine, this should be as simple as changing the file extension and ensuring that default.cfm is on the list of default documents in IIS Admin.

There should be no need in IIS for unique homepage names in your sites. How are you setting up your sites in IIS Admin? Are you editing the Windows host file and then setting up "New" sites in IIS Admin? Are you running each site in its own sub-folder in wwwroot and then trying to access them with a URL similar to http://localhost/somesite? Is it another setup altogether (and if so, what do you do)?

When I deal with IIS, I typically do the following:
1. Set up a special, development domain name and store it in my Windows Host File (i.e., dev.mysite.com)
2. Set up a New Site in IIS Admin for the domain dev.mysite.com and point that new site to the desired directory on the server
3. Set up a CFIDE Viritual Directory inside this newly created site in IIS Admin (this can be crucial depending on what CF functions/features you use)
4. Ensure that index.cfm is listed in the allowed documents for the site in IIS Admin
5. When I want to preview my site, I point my browser to http://dev.mysite.com and test/view my site.

I also ran sites straight out of folders/directories with the localhost domain (i.e., http://localhost/mysite_com) without any issues but I prefer to use the host-based approach above (shorter URLs, more like how it is on a production server, etc.).